Weeknote 2024/19

May 13, 2024November 12, 2024 / Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

A change is as good as a rest, or so the saying goes. But this week’s involved a lot of change and not much rest and, well, I’m just really bloody tired.

So apologies, but I’m going to skip the laboured intro this week. I’m on a plane for the fourth time in under a week and this week note is late and I just can’t brain anymore today.

Some stuff I did this week

My big focus this week was Camp Digital, the annual event from the folks at Nexer Digital on digital, design and UX. Every year they put on a brilliant, inspirational day which really forces us to think about what good digital is and should be. A world away from the endless vendor presentations you see at so many events.

My highlights:

Finally hearing Lou Downe talk about bad (and good) services, and the impact service design has on real lives.

Refreshing and honest lessons from Katy Arnold on design leadership in the unforgiving context of central government. So many useful lessons there which are equally applicable in corporates. We need to bring people (and leadership) with us to drive real change, and digital teams are often bad at making friends across the wider organisation.

Bringing 300 Seconds to the Camp Digital stage for the second time. Our four new speakers – Laura McKendrick, Galina Ostroumova, Candy Ogbebor and Aershey Khan – all bought fresh stories, perspectives and experiences to the agenda.

*Our four 300 Seconds speakers on the stage. So proud of them all!*

As I said in my intro to this session, the ideas we share from the podium have currency beyond the room. They become part of our industry dialogue, and feed into what we do.

If we want digital services that work for everyone we need to broaden that dialogue. Our four speakers did exactly that – and brilliantly too. I’m sure we’ll be seeing more of them all.

The *other* goal of our 300 Seconds x Camp Digital session is to build a pipeline of speakers for future years. So it was fantastic to witness Coco Chan‘s progress from doing her first lightning talk last year to running her own (hugely oversubscribed) session this year.

The day ended on a smashing, surreal note with Seb Lee-Delisle‘s rapid-fire presentation on massive laser installations. It meandered from burning holes in your walls by having lasers on at home to lighting up a city in lockdown from your balcony to a huge audience-volume-controlled game of Flappy Bird.

All in, a fantastic and inspirational day. See you again next year, Campers.

No sooner did I get home than I hit the road again, to plan and deliver a workshop for a client who have a number of complex, inter-related workstreams.

I really enjoy creating workshops. Thinking of ways to focus minds, encourage honest discussion and feedback, and turning that into alignment and action. I’m on my way home now, knackered but generally feeling positive about a job well done.

What I’ve been reading

But What Can I Do? by Alastair Campbell addresses the pressing (yet entirely understandable) issue of political disengagement and disillusionment. With his trademark directness and clarity, Campbell outlines practical strategies for ordinary folk to become more involved in political and social activism.

With an eye on the forthcoming election (dear God can they just put everyone out of their misery), Campbell offers a potent blend of inspiration and practicality, aiming to reignite the public’s commitment to civic duty. This is a clarion call for action, urging individuals to reclaim their agency and contribute to the democratic process. For those of us feeling disillusioned or powerless in today’s way-too-much-all-the-time political climate, Campbell’s work serves as both a guidebook and a source of renewed hope. And that’s something we all need right now.

Connections

Loads! Camp Digital is something of a reunion of digital government OGs. It was fantastic to catch up with Sarah Drummond, Lou Downe and Katy Arnold at the speakers’ dinner, and to meet Seb Lee-Delisle for the first time. I introduced Sarah and Lou to my ‘100 people’ mission to intentionally keep up with my network, and I think I have a couple of converts.

I’m lucky that a good number of ‘industry contacts’ have become friends, and it was a great opportunity to catch up with so many of them. But the less said about the secret karaoke toilet, the better.

The hotel review no one asked for

This week saw me at the Maldron Hotel in Manchester City Centre. Not a bad spot at all.

But while they’ve eschewed the infuriatingly tiny water glasses favoured by so many hotels, they’ve replaced them with cartons of plant-based water which just raise more questions.

Weeknote 2024/13

March 30, 2024March 30, 2024 / Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

number 13 in a heart on gravel — Photo by SC Lime (Pexels)

“Genres are a funny little concept, aren’t they? Yes, they are. In theory, they have a simple definition that’s easy to understand. But in practice, well, some may feel confined.”
— Beyonce, SPAGHETTII

It’s barely a day since Beyonce – not content with her status as Queen of Pop – released Cowboy Carter and rode into country music like she owns the place.

She’s plucked a little bit of hip-hop here and mixed it with some psychedelic funk there, pulled in a bit of Miley Cyrus, covered a Beatles song and even reimagines Jolene, with fiercer lyrics and an intro from Dolly P herself.

I’ve listened to it through over and over and I love every darn thing about it. I even went to a Bey special spin class this morning, in which Velo’s indefatigable Jeff can make a legit claim to have delivered the world’s first Cowboy Carter indoor cycling class.

The album is a masterclass in reinvention, in bending genres to your will, in never sitting still, and not just being comfortable with change but embracing it, thriving on it and having everyone love you for it.

I like to think I can be a little bit Bey. I mean, I have a career that’s veered from publishing to comms to tech to consultancy to… whatever this is.

But I am writing this weeknote from the hairdressers, where I am getting exactly the same haircut that I have had since 2005.

Beyonce I am not. But I guess I’ll never be Jolene or Becky With The Good Hair either.

Some things I did this week

The big theme of this week was wrapping up. We’ve completed two discovery programmes recently. This week the focus was on helping both of those teams to socialise these internally and turn them into budget and support to move forward with the required change.

One of these teams is considering both build and buy options for their intranet. Every client is different so I can never give an answer without considering their specific circumstances and needs. But on the whole unless your needs are genuinely unusual, building your own is rarely worth it. I was reminded of this blogpost I wrote on exactly this; despite being five years old I still stick by this principle:

You could build it, and in doing so you could make it perfectly meet your needs. But, really, can you be arsed?

Between wrapping up and people being off for the long weekend it was a relatively quiet one. I took the opportunity of an entirely meeting-free day to skive off on a day trip to Maastricht. A rather delightful little city, with some interesting history, decent places to eat and a truly next-level bookshop.

Between that and the trip down to Den Haag I zipped up and down the country twice for under €100 all-in, with no pre-booking or discount railcards or anything. In case anyone wants to know what a well-functioning nationalised rail network looks like.

What I’m reading

Electrify: An Optimist’s Playbook for Our Clean Energy Future by Saul Griffith.

The tl;dr is “make everything run on electricity, then we can use renewables to make it all work without everyone having to give up the stuff they like”.

The author isn’t just dreaming big; he’s got the science and engineering chops to back up his vision. He breaks down the idea of electrifying everything—from cars to homes to entire industries—with renewable energy sources like wind and solar, making it seem not just possible, but achievable (and even exciting?).

What I liked about this book is how it combines optimism with pragmatism. Griffith lays out a blueprint for us to follow, showing how current technology can be harnessed to create a sustainable future without sacrificing the comforts of modern life. Plus, he dives into how this shift could save money and create jobs, making the economic case for clean energy just as strong as the environmental one.

Amidst gloomy predictions about the future of the climate and increasingly extreme weather highlighting the pace at which this is becoming a lived reality, it was refreshing to think about the climate crisis in the context of a clear, actionable path forward.

It’s a mix of inspiring vision and hands-on advice that could really make you look at the world differently and feel hopeful about our ability to tackle climate change head-on. If (like me) you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by the doom and gloom of environmental Armageddon, this book offers a refreshing perspective.

Connections

When I wrote my last weeknote I had no particular plans to meet anyone. But the best plans are spontaneous ones.

Susan Hayes Cullerton (aka the Positive Economist) was in the Netherlands so we had a lovely catch up in Den Haag. A cracking evening of chat about the challenges and joys of running your own business.

Then the following day I caught up with AutogenAI’s Gurjinder Dhaliwal, a fellow Brit-in-NL, to talk navigating life in the Netherlands.

Something I learned

That coming up with a new Something I Learned every week is a huge PITA that makes writing a weekly note more work and less fun than I’d like. Binned.

Weeknote 2024/03

January 19, 2024November 12, 2024 / Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

Like much of western Europe, the Netherlands was hit with an Arctic Blast, which turned out to be little more than a light dusting of snow. And Amsterdam is insanely pretty in the snow.

Some stuff I did this week

We’re into the weeds with a client we’re supporting on a big digital comms transformation programme. Challenges this week included:

finding names for things that make sense to people
working out loud without creating more work for everyone because we don’t have answers to a lot of questions yet
our concept of internal and external audiences is nowhere near as clear as it used to be for communicators. Lots of people are both, or have a need that changes over time. And people who are internal might well be internal somewhere else too so you need to work harder to accommodate – and can’t necessarily expect them to care to the same extent. All that means we need to think how we serve audiences that might sit just outside a traditional definition of internal comms.

Won a new client 🎉 Looking forward to getting cracking with them soon.

On the flipside, we’ve had to do a swift pivot on work with a third client as they have some major internal changes happening and everyone felt it wasn’t right to move ahead with the discovery work we had planned. It’s a little frustrating to have to hit pause, but from experience if you do surveys and interviews in a period of change, they become an outlet for people to vent about the change rather than your communications, and you don’t get particularly useful outputs. Hope to pick that up again when the time’s right.

We sponsored UKEduCamp last week. It was the first time we’ve sponsored an event. I had no real idea if this would be worth doing, commercially, but we’ve been working with a few HE institutions lately and think it’s a fascinating space and wanted to support the folks making positive change in the sector. Anyway, we’ve had a few good conversations off the back of that this week.

I also saw Soulwax at the Paradiso. They had three drummers and it was the most incredible, visceral, almost primal sound. I can assure you there are no lessons I can draw from this on the subject of digital transformation.

Connections

Just the one this week: Met up with Cerys Hersey from Post*Shift for lunch and excellent chat.

What I’m reading

Code of Conduct: Why We Need to Fix Parliament” by Chris Bryant MP. As chair of the Committee on Standards and Privileges and Parliament’s foremost history nerd, Bryant chronicles the decline in standards, with more MPs resigning or suspended in this Parliament than any in history. He argues for Members to have increased control over parliamentary affairs – taking this away from the Executive – and advocates for greater ministerial accountability, transparency in lobbying and stricter penalties for misbehaviour. So far, so sensible.

But what I really appreciated was references ranged from the Merciless Parliament of 1388 to Ru Paul and the Sugababes. I love it when someone’s confident enough in their subject knowledge they can happily, unashamedly embrace the lowbrow.

Something I learned

On Weds and Thurs I tuned in to a few sessions of IntraTeam’s online event. I particularly like their events and community as there’s a core of people who attend year after year, all working on complex digital workplaces. That means the agenda aways includes in-depth sessions on really thorny case studies, huge organisations and mature ecosystems covering the full gamut of comms, collaboration, transactional and productivity tools.

My highlight was a session led by Frank Giroux on implementing generative AI at pharmaceutical giant Bayer. He talked about collecting and sharing stories on how colleagues are using (secure, enterprise) ChatGPT. What caught my attention was when he talked about a biweekly roundup of AI success stories which is shared across the organisation to encourage adoption and experimentation. Too many adoption programmes focus on selling defined benefits; it was interesting to see adoption comms encouraging people to experiment and inspiring them to find their own uses and affordances. An approach I fully intend to borrow.

I also learned that the Dutch for baseball is honkbal and I am not at all sure I can get over this.

Weeknote 2024/01

January 5, 2024November 12, 2024 / Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

*The quantity not quality approach to New Years fireworks here in Amsterdam*

Inspired by Ann Kempster’s efforts, and having promised myself I’d write more this year, I’m going to start sharing a bit more about what I’m doing once a week or so*

* until I inevitably get too busy, or forget.

The new year arrived here in Amsterdam as it traditionally does… by making the city sound like a war zone. While other cities have one spectacular, giant firework display for people to gawp at, here in the Netherlands they have thousands of considerably less spectacular anarchic ones. For days leading up to oud en nieuw you’ll hear fireworks being set off everywhere, in an auditory scene redolent of Sam Mendes’ movie 1917.

12 children are reported to have lost a hand thanks to oudjaarsavond fireworks this year.

My hearing returned roughly when my New Years hangover lifted sometime on 2 January, as I pulled together my round-up of 2023.

From Wednesday I eased myself into work slowly after the festive break. I began with the Opening Of Teams And Outlook. Working with multiple organisations at a time gives one the opportunity to compare their cultures and ways of working, and this was just such an occasion. I’m currently a member of four different Teams environments. I opened each, gingerly, in turn in their respective Chrome profiles.

One: Not a peep from anyone in over a week
Another: A bunch of emails and Teams messages, including some sent on Christmas Day itself

Yes, to a degree that’s a reflection of both local/national cultures (not everyone celebrates Christmas), but the online culture of work is led from the top. If people see leaders sending emails and messages over the holidays, they’ll feel pressure to do the same.

My tip: feel free to work when’s best for you, but if you’re a leader or manager then use that schedule button and send your message in regular working days/hours, to encourage healthy working habits in those around you.

(full disclosure: I used to be absolutely dreadful for all-hours emailing when I was in-house. If you worked with/for me back then, I’m sorry).

By Thursday the break was a distant memory as projects picked up in earnest.

Some stuff I did this week

Finished a ‘comms and collaboration playbook’ for one client to help them get the most out of Teams/M365 by aligning on agreed ways of working. Microsoft don’t help their users by offering at least three different ways of doing the same thing, all with same names. And which they keep changing. I work with this stuff day in day out, and even I’m confused a lot of the time.

On the plus side, Jon accidentally discovered live gesture reactions on a Teams call this week, putting two thumbs up and accidentally injecting a firework display into a client call. To give Microsoft credit, it was both more impressive and a hell of a lot safer than your average Dutch display.

Got back into the weeds of work on an intranet programme, looking at some of the gnarly governance questions.

Landed an interesting speaking gig for later in the year. Not a bad start to the year, work-wise.

Connections

I haven’t yet written my 100 People list for 2024. But I had a couple of good not-work-related-but-kinda chats this week.

A nice call with a founder who’s interested in building something in the digital workplace space (I love geeking out on this stuff),

A splendid irl catch up with Cate McLaurin over beer and ribs.

I’m in London and Oxford next week. I’ve already got a couple of catch-ups booked in for while I’m there; if you’re around and want to catch up, give me a shout and let’s see if we can find time.

What I’m reading

Friend and regular Lithos Partner-er Lisa Reimers bought me Marie Le Conte’s Escape for Christmas. I’m about halfway through and enjoying it very much so far. It’s interesting how much is relatable, as someone who’s been extremely online from my early teens… and yet how different some of it is to my own experience as someone a good decade older, joining the party when the internet was a very different place.